Summary
Things are still going wrong in Your Friends & Neighbors Season 2, but they’re ceasing to be the point when Father Time remains the most ruthless adversary of all.
Your Friends & Neighbors has never been a cautionary tale. It’s a satire, if anything, a joke at the expense of people who have so much that they don’t even know when it’s being taken from under their noses. But Season 2 is becoming about something else. The recurring point in Episode 5 is that it doesn’t matter how much you have. All the money and prestige and luxury in the world won’t stop the greatest thief of all from catching up with you. Father Time is coming for us.
It isn’t immediately obvious that “Halfway to Invisible” is about this. It initially seems to be developing the usual plotlines after their latest developments, and it is doing that, granted. But at some point, it becomes clear that the recurring thread uniting every character in this story, even peripheral ones like Coop’s creepy old boss, Jack, is that they’re all closer to death than they’d like. They’re all losing sight of who they once were. And none of them are rich enough to do anything about it.
We might as well start with Mel. With Sam back in the sauna and thus the social circle, she feels even more ostracised. Her own body is turning on her, her daughter and her neighbor can’t stand her, and the closest she gets to romance is an afternoon fantasy interrupted by the incessant whirr of construction. After a chance meeting with Miguel, the foreman of that construction crew, he becomes a temporary subject of her fantasies, but reality keeps creeping in and ruining the illusion.
Mel is desperate to unburden herself, but who to? Coop is too busy, Tori doesn’t want to know, and her friends are disinterested, focused on their more scandalous neighbors. Ironically, it ends up being Sam whom Mel unloads on, albeit reluctantly. A lot of what Mel is going through is played for laughs, but the show is smart enough to know when to turn the seriousness on, and Amanda Peet is really good when she starts to come undone.
She isn’t the only one. Barney may not be far behind. He’s already unsure about Grace’s pregnancy, not to mention the fact that he’s now laundering Coop and Elena’s thieving proceeds through Nick’s Strong Ass Gyms. That creates a whole new problem. Nick, without Barney’s approval as his financial advisor, has allowed Ashe to buy into the business. His offer was too substantial to be ignored, but his involvement means his General Counsel, Luc DeMille, will carry out a full financial audit. Ashe is already blackmailing Coop. If he discovers that he now has a controlling interest in a business with his entire nest egg buried in it, he’ll become even more insufferable.
On account of this audit, all of Coop and Elena’s money is frozen, which proves to be bad news for Elena since her brother, Chivo, gets himself arrested and needs a $50,000 bail. Without any other options, Elena borrows the money from Felix, who puts it up happily, but with the expectation of getting it back. Chivo is a lot less grateful than you’d expect, though, and after an argument, he does a runner, leaving Elena with a sizeable bill and, currently, no way to pay it.
The only upside for Coop in Your Friends & Neighbors Season 2, Episode 5 is that he’s finally able to get Ashe’s money into the Excelsior fund. This proves to be a laborious process, since the fund’s primary investor, Cricket Birch, wants to speak with Coop to assuage any suspicions about why he’d be willing to work with Jack after Jack stabbed him in the back last season. It’s a fair point, but once Coop and Jack climb aboard Cricket’s superyacht, it becomes clear she has an ulterior motive. She and Coop have a past — years prior, she’d drunkenly thrown herself at him, and he’d taken her home without taking her to bed. His entry into Excelsior seems to be contingent on him righting that wrong, which he seems pretty happy to do.
Everything is transactional, after all. Nobody knows this better than Jack, who takes so many boner pills that his manhood turns purple and has to be drained by the ship’s medic. He has made plenty of big deals in his time, but unfortunately, his time has passed. And he knows it. Cricket dismisses him from the meeting; he needs medical aid to have a good time, and he can’t even get that right. He’s no longer the guy he used to be. He never will be again. It’s a totally unexpected moment of vulnerability and truth, but Jack’s lesson — that Coop, too, will become him eventually — is the episode’s most salient. Everything is finite.
As if to hammer this point home, at the end of “Halfway to Invisible”, Coop gets a call telling him his dad has died. He was only hanging an unreasonably large TV that morning. You can have all the things you want. But, ultimately, you can’t take them with you.
